The More Realistic Great Wealth Transfer: Lower Estimates Are Still Great News for Charities

The Great Wealth Transfer predicted for more than two decades is real and underway. But the most often-quoted number, $124 trillion, is unrealistic, and the charity share attached to it is far too large. The figure has become the default headline not just in board meetings and planned giving conferences, but in the New York Times, CNBC, Forbes, Bankrate, to name a few.  When a figure gets repeated this often across multiple sources, then it is no longer an estimate but an expectation.

In December 2024, Cerulli Associates projected that $124 trillion will transfer through 2048, with $105 trillion flowing to heirs and $18 trillion to charity. (Cerulli Associates, 2024)  A more realistic intergenerational wealth transfer estimate is $35-$40 trillion through 2048, with an estimated $3-$5 trillion to charity. That is still the largest philanthropic opportunity in history.

This article is an attempt to level-set expectations without dissuading nonprofit leaders from investing in gift planning. While I don’t pretend to be a data scientist, I have spent more than two months talking with leading researchers exclusively focused on philanthropy and sorting through loads of wealth data. I’ve concluded that Third Sector leaders must replace a number that will disappoint with one that can be planned against, and to show that the realistic number is still extraordinarily large.

Why Previous Wealth Transfer Forecasts Fell Short

Nonprofits have already lived through one unrealistic wealth transfer forecast. In October 1999, Paul Schervish and John Havens of Boston College’s Social Welfare Research Institute published Millionaires and the Millennium. (Schervish, 1999) They projected that $41 trillion to $136 trillion would transfer between 1998 and 2052, with $6 trillion to $25 trillion going to charity, and hailed what they called a “golden age of philanthropy.”

The forecast shaped a generation of fundraising. Financial firms marketed products around it, and nonprofits built planned giving programs on it. By 2006, several publications reported that the expected wave had not arrived. The report’s authors pointed to the reasons: household wealth fell about 5% from 1999 to 2002 when the model assumed 2% to 4% annual growth, mortality rates improved, and more donors gave during life rather than at death.  The significant shortfall was not a failure of generosity but a failure of assumptions.

The Math to Get to $18 Trillion

For Americans to give Cerulli’s estimated $18 trillion through bequests by 2048, estate gifts would have to average more than $750 billion a year for the next 24 years. That is more than Americans gave to charity last year from all sources combined.

The trajectory for bequests is up, and giving through estate gifts increased 19.7% in 2025. (Foundation, 2026)  Moreover, they have grown 20% or more in three of the last four years. But bequests have made up only about 7% to 10% of total giving for four decades, and their 10-year annualized growth rate is 5.9%.

Closing the gap would require bequest giving to grow roughly 17% a year, compounded, for more than two decades. Nothing in the historical record suggests that is likely, even as death rates will increase in the 2030s as baby boomers die.

What Could Reduce the Great Wealth Transfer

One must also consider that the wealth on today’s balance sheets is not the wealth that will be left at death. Several forces stand between the two, and each deserves more weight than the headline numbers give it.

Firstly, while baby boomers are the wealthiest generation in history, they also carry more debt into old age than previous generations.  More than half of households headed by someone 75 or older carried debt in 2022, up from about 41% a decade earlier. (Osmonbekov, 2026) Visa’s economists found that 41% of homeowners ages 65 to 79, and 31% of those 80 and older, still have a mortgage. (USA Visa, 2026)  Older Americans are also tapping home equity again: roughly 57% of home equity lines of credit opened in 2023 and early 2024 went to borrowers 50 and older.

Secondly, healthcare costs will also reduce many Americans’ net worth during the final years of life. Fidelity estimates that a 65-year-old retiring in 2026 will spend an average of $185,500 on healthcare in retirement, or about $371,000 for a couple. (Konish, 2026) That estimate rose 7.5% in a single year, and it excludes long-term care entirely.

Thirdly, someone turning 65 has a roughly 70% chance of needing long-term care. The national median cost of a private nursing home room reached $129,575 a year in 2025, and a semi-private room $114,975. (Genworth Financial, 2026)  Medicare does not pay for custodial care, and Medicaid pays only after assets are largely spent down. For many middle-class families, the house and the IRA that were supposed to become an inheritance become the payment for care instead.

Fourthly, people are living longer, which means more years of retirement spending and later transfers. Both Schervish/Havens and Visa’s economists identified longer lives as a reason earlier transfer forecasts ran ahead of reality.

Lastly, Cerulli notes that approximately $62 trillion, more than half its total, comes from high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth households, just 2% of all households. The top 10% of boomer households held 71% of the generation’s wealth in 2022, while nearly a third of Americans 55 and older have no retirement savings. A transfer this concentrated depends heavily on 2% household wealth donors and on market values at the moment of death.

Cerulli Associates has told reporters that its model accounts for retirement spending, taxes, and debt. However, it has not published its methodology or its assumptions about healthcare, long-term care, market returns, or mortality. Without transparency, the $124 trillion and $18 trillion figures cannot be tested, and therefore should not be treated as forecasts to budget against.

A More Realistic Great Wealth Transfer Estimate

More realistic figures are approximately $36 – $40 trillion in net wealth transferred through 2048, with $3 – $5 trillion going to charity. These are my estimates, but they are not outliers. In July 2026, Visa Business and Economic Insights estimated that about $36 trillion of the baby boomers’ $93 trillion in assets will pass to heirs over the next 20 years, after subtracting debt, retirement spending, taxes, and fees. (Frank, 2026)

The charitable range can be checked against the Giving USA data directly. Start from 2025’s $62.2 billion in bequests and let it grow at its 10-year average of 5.9% a year: bequests add up to about $3.1 trillion by 2048. Let it grow at a strong 8.5% a year, well above its long-run trend, and the total is about $4.4 trillion.

Why More Realistic Amounts Are Still Great News

More realistic scenarios are good news for the nonprofit sector, as $3 – $5 trillion dollars in bequests would still qualify as the “golden age of philanthropy.”  It is roughly 50 to 80 times what charities received through bequests in 2025. Spread over the next two decades, bequest revenue would increase every year and eventually reach well beyond $100 billion annually. No other source of charitable revenue offers that kind of runway.

The Great Wealth Transfer does not need to be $124 trillion to be transformational. It needs to be understood clearly enough that charities can prepare for it. Set expectations at a realistic level, and the transfer is far more likely to exceed them than to disappoint, especially for organizations with a robust and growing gift planning program.